…says a 78-year old Albanian woman who made an oath of celibacy in return for the right to live and rule her family as a man.

“Back then, it was better to be a man because, before, a woman and an animal were considered the same thing,” says Keqi, who has a bellowing baritone voice, sits with her legs open wide like a man and relishes downing shots of Raki and smoking cigarettes. “Now, Albanian women have equal rights with men and are even more powerful, and I think today it would be fun to be a woman.”

She says:

“I was totally free as a man because no one knew I was a woman,” Keqi said. “I could go wherever I wanted to and no one would dare swear at me because I could beat them up. I was only with men. I don’t know how to do women’s talk. I am never scared.”

Well, I do think that it would serve women well to know how to defend ourselves. And, I’m not so sure about the ‘never scared’ part. But you know, she’s right. It is fun to be a woman. And it’s great to be alive in these times.

Well, it’s all over for white girls. Sigh. With Michelle Obama soon to be the next first lady, with her great looks, sense of style, and great speaking ability; white women just pale in comparison. And, here it begins… Italian Vogue’s new issue features black women in all the photos, black women’s issues in all the articles. And, damn it, they look great!

Black women can wear great, bright colors that would make me look like a clown. They can wear fabulous jewelry that looks junky on me. Have you ever been in a room full of black women dressed to the nines? It’s like comparing a nice little pastel to a Picasso.

But black women have always been gorgeous. What’s new is that black women are now trendy. Just as Ellen made being a lesbian hip and cool, Michelle Obama is making being a black woman fabulous. And, it’s great! About time, I must say – the culture hasn’t been so kind to black women over the years.

However, I must confess to a little nostalgia for the good old days when medium brown hair and pale skin weren’t so, well, blah. So, we straight, white girls will just keep plugging away. We’ll cycle through black, latina, and asian periods of coolness; let the bi-sexual girls have their day; and just patiently wait, hoping that our day will return.

We went into Iraq largely due to representations on the part of an ‘operative’ codenamed Curveball that Saddam Hussein was in possession of weapons of mass destruction – the mushroom cloud possibility. Right? That’s the story.

Now I understand that intelligence is rarely cut and tried. You gather a lot of information and try to connect the dots. You find people who are credible. Many of them might have ulterior motives, checkered pasts, hidden agendas. I acknowledge these problems. However, to read this article about the person that is Curveball, one Rafid Ahmed Alwan, is to sit with your jaw dropped to the ground in amazement thinking “our government risked everything on the word of this bozo?” I’m not kidding. Some excerpts from the article:

“He was corrupt,” said a family friend who once employed him.

“He always lied,” said a fellow Burger King worker.

And records reveal that when Alwan fled to Germany, one step ahead of the Iraq Justice Ministry, an arrest warrant had been issued alleging that he sold filched camera equipment on the Baghdad black market.

and…

Alwan didn’t share all his secrets. He didn’t disclose that he had been fired at least twice for dishonesty, or that he fled Iraq to avoid arrest. But he did tell some whoppers that should have raised warnings about his credibility.

He claimed, for example, that the son of his former boss, Basil Latif, secretly headed a vast weapons of mass destruction procurement and smuggling scheme from England. British investigators found, however, that Latif’s son was a 16-year-old exchange student, not a criminal mastermind.